Anyone who expected HTML5 to be more standard or consistent than previous HTML standards hasn’t been paying attention to the web over the past 13+ years.

Google’s decision to drop H.264 may be surprising as a specific item, but the idea of supporting and not supporting various parts of HTML5 (or what vendors hope might be in HTML5 as it becomes a standard over the next several years) is something everyone should expect.

I have held out exactly zero hope for a consistent HTML5 implementation across the various browser vendors. Why? It is simple economics.

If IE, Chrome, FF and other browsers on Windows were completely standards complaint in all respects there would be no reason for all those browsers. The only browser that would exist is IE because it ships with Windows.

The same is true on the Mac and any other platform. If the browsers implement exactly the same behaviors, they can’t differentiate, so nobody would use anything except the browser shipping with the OS.

But the browser vendors have their own agendas and goals, which have nothing to do with standards compliance or consistency. Every browser vendor is motivated by economics – whether that’s mindshare for other products or web properties, data mining, advertising, or other factors. These vendors want you to use their browser more than other browsers.

So in a “standards-based world” how do you convince people to use your product when it is (in theory) identical to every other product?

When products have a price you could try to compete on that price. That’s a losing game though, because when you undercut the average price you have less money to innovate or even keep up. So even in the 1990’s with Unix standards vendors didn’t play the pricing game – it is just a slow death.

But browsers are free, so even if you wanted the slow death of the price-war strategy you can’t play it in the browser world. So you are left with “embrace and extend” or “deviate from the standard” as your options. And every browser vendor must play this game or just give up and die.

This happened to Unix in the 1990’s too – the various vendors didn’t want to play on price, so they added features beyond any standard with the intent of doing two things:

Lure users to their version of Unix because it is “better”

Lock them into your version of Unix because as soon as they use your cool features they are stuck on your version

The same is true with browsers and HTML5. All browser vendors are jockeying now (before the standard is set) to differentiate and shape the standard. But even once there is a “standard” they’ll continue to support the various features they’ve added that didn’t make it into the standard.

This is necessary, because it is the only way any given browser can lure users away from the other browsers, thereby meeting the vendors’ long term goals.

People often say they don’t want a homogenous computing world. That they want a lot of variation and variety in the development platforms used across the industry. Over the past 13+ years HTML has proven that variation is absolutely possible, and that it is very expensive and frustrating.

Working for consulting companies during all this time, I can say that HTML is a great thing. Consultants charge by the hour, and any scenario where the same app must be rebuilt, or at least tweaked, for every browser and every new version of every browser is just a way to generate more revenue.

Is HTML a drag on the world economy overall? Sure it is. Anything that automatically increases the cost of software development like HTML is an economic drag by definition. The inefficiency is built-in.

The only place (today) with more inefficiency is the mobile space, where every mobile platform has a unique development environment, tools, languages and technologies. I love the mobile space – any app you want to build must be created for 2-5 different platforms, all paid for at an hourly rate. (this is sarcasm btw – I really dislike this sort of blatant inefficiency and waste)

But I digress. Ultimately what I’m saying is that expecting HTML5 to provide more consistency than previous versions of HTML is unrealistic, and moves like Google just took are something we should all expect to happen on a continuing basis.